Hover: Revolt Of Gamers Review

Hover: Revolt of Gamers is an open world platforming game where you take control of a character that you pick and enter Hover City to join the rebellion called Gamers as you fight against the city’s control on anti-leisure. After you create your character and name your team, you’re immediately dropped in and given the basics to traverse through the city. You can run, jump, grind on rails, do flip tricks, spray paint graffiti, and even rewind yourself to a previous point, which makes certain challenges interesting to figure out. Controls are simple, as you only need to use either four face buttons or the shoulder and trigger buttons. The game also offers multiple camera views from first person, third person, and a mix between the two depending on what tricks you do. When you’re jumping and running around the city, some may be reminded of a game like Mirrors Edge or Jet Set Radio. The highlight of the game definitely comes from traveling around the city as you find new missions to complete, such as playing a basketball type sport or racing another member of the resistance.

For as fun as it is running around, I ran into a lot of problems when trying to climb buildings or making certain jumps. This was mainly due to the character feeling pretty weightless so I would either overshoot my jumps or not jump far enough to another platform. Then there are the missions, which are left up to you to go find and complete. After your finish the tutorial, you’re just thrown into the city. You are given objectives to complete but there’s almost no way to tell where to go to start those missions. The map is very basic and completely useless as it doesn’t tell you how high or low certain objective points are and it isn’t very intuitive as it just lies out on your screen over your character. Navigating the menu is also handled poorly as you’re given a cursor to move with the analog stick as if it was a mouse instead of just having the selections highlighted and moving your choice with the D-Pad or analog stick. You also never learn any new tricks with your character and the only real progress you make is getting different graffiti signs to tag the city with and chips are used to enhance skills like speed and jump.

After the first 3-4 hours into Hover, I wasn’t really feeling compelled to continue too much as I felt like the game wasn’t going to offer anything new beyond what I had played and even though the city looks cool. I didn’t find myself that interested in the characters that live in it including the ones that you help. I even tried to mess with the online feature to play with others but the game would freeze on me a minute in with the online feature on. I didn’t run into the problem with the PC version. Hover does some things well but after stepping into the city, I didn’t want to stay long outside of listening to the wonderful soundtrack that they got here by Cédric Menendez and Hideki Naganuma.